Assemblages & Affinities: Reimagining Interdisciplinarity Symposium

University of Illinois Research Board Diversity Funding Pilot Initiative and other units

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Building on recent collaborative, international conversations about the conditions and possibilities for interdisciplinarity under current and emerging structures and strategies of the public university, this symposium hopes to contribute to this critical discussion by identifying and crafting new questions for reimagining (and reclaiming, if necessary) interdisciplinarity. Our keynote speakers will take up the question of interdisciplinarity as an intellectual quandary and a structural dilemma. Through such concepts as assemblage and affinity, we invite critique of the certainties required for simple comparison --discreteness, distinctiveness, discontinuity '' as well as new approaches for productive inquiry. And, under the intertwined contexts of disciplines under crisis, what appears to be a re-disciplinization (as the conveners of The University Beyond Crisis at CUNY have identified), and a neoliberalizing public university, we hope to illuminate pathways for articulating new arrangements in the intellectual and institutional spaces we inhabit. How then do we create the conditions for these new forms and inquiries to emerge from within our interdisciplines?

This symposium is generously funded by the University of Illinois Research Board Diversity Funding Pilot Initiative, and co-sponsored by American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Anthropology, Asian American Cultural Center, Asian American Studies, English, Gender and Women''s Studies, History, Latina/Latino Studies, The LGBT Resource Center, La Casa Cultural Latina, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

More information about the symposium, including the program schedule, can be found here: http://assemblagesandaffinities.weebly.com